Alfred University's Equine Industry in Ireland: The Connemara Countryside

By Kristen

Today we met a tour guide named Collette at our hotel in Galway and headed west into Connemara. The countryside changed gradually from hilly but arable to craggy and inhospitable. The green cattle fields gave way to scrappy sheep pastures in hues of brown and red and olive, overshadowed by majestic hills and small mountains that rose without the warning of foothills. The land on either side of the road was dotted with small lakes; the mountainous cliffs were streaked with waterfalls cascading down their sheer faces. We were in a different kind of environment entirely.

Our first stop was at Kylemore Abbey, essentially a small castle tucked away on the shore of a small lake at the foot of a great mountain. A Victorian manor, Kylemore looked exactly like most people's fairytale imaginings of a magical castle and most of us were blown away just by looking at the outside. Inside, the rooms were re-furnished with period decorations; the upstairs part of the castle housed an order of Benedictine nuns. These nuns closed the doors of their boarding and day school a few years ago but still reside at Kylemore.

The estate also included a walled Victorian garden, impressive not only for the well-groomed garden beds and greenhouses themselves but for the fact that it was carved out of land that was alternately rocky or boggy. This region of Ireland is known for its peat bogs, used primarily for cutting "turf" or peat logs for the Irish to burn as fuel to heat their homes. Between turf and sheep and fishing, these three resources make up most of Connemara's industry.

We then headed to the Connemara National Park for a short hike into the hills, from which we could see all the way to the bays and the Atlantic Ocean. In the small museum also on site, we learned that the great peat bogs were actually created by mankind from felling Ireland's great oak forests and burning off the land afterwards; this created a choking charcoal that prevented new vegetation from growing and allowed the ground to absorb large amounts of water to form a bog. The topic of what to do with the peat bogs and turf-cutting makes a controversial issue for the Irish--but not in Connemara, whose bogs are so expansive that there is no worry in the immediate future of using up this resource and changing the face of the western country yet again.